The Digital Marketing scenario in Trivandrum
The Digital Marketing business in Trivandrum has taken a complete U-turn in the latter half of 2019.
The situation is grim and it is quite hard these days to convince clients to spend more on Digital Marketing.
Clients cannot be blamed for that. It may be because of the bad experience of working with the previous team. The financial recession also contributes to the sad state of affairs in the industry.
As far as closing a good deal in the Digital Marketing business in Trivandrum, only the best of the best can do it. Many companies are forced to quote quite low and then work under huge pressure.
Proper homework and intelligent strategies are required for an effective sales pitch. The usual long powerpoint presentation aimed to amaze the client with the intensity of the technical jargon used in it is clearly taking a backseat.
What the clients are looking for?
What does a client want ultimately?
A client who is going to spend on Digital Marketing will be looking for massive ROI in the forms of growth in sales and an increase in revenue.
Your client will be more concerned about your experience in doing Digital Marketing for similar companies in the same vertical. Your fantastic performance in a different vertical will not generate any sort of interest in him.
The client will look for facts and figures specifically of your past projects. He will be interested in knowing about the actual sales growth figures you have brought in for your previous Digital Marketing clients.
In-short whatever your sales pitch is, you should substantiate it with relevant facts and figures.
Are the clients misinformed?
Most of the Digital Marketing clients in Trivandrum are terribly misinformed about the capabilities and limitations of Digital Marketing.
Many clients believe that inducting Digital Marketing to their marketing landscape is going to double increase their sales growth overnight.
These misconceptions were created in the minds of the clients by the aggressive and short-sighted approach adopted by certain Digital Marketing companies for winning projects.
So, for any professional Digital Marketing company to win a deal from a good client, first they have to clear all the misconceptions and unrealistic expectations of the client. Otherwise, even if they win the project it is going to be detrimental for the project execution.
How to correct the misconceptions?
Firstly, you need to establish the fact that your job as a Digital Marketer is to boost the brand and generate high quality, highly convertible inbound sales leads and not conversions.
Business conversion never comes under the responsibility of a Digital Marketing company. It is completely up to the client’s sales team to contact the leads and bring it to closure.
You should inform the client that their Digital Marketing strategy cannot revolve around one social media platform (for example Facebook). There should be a holistic approach towards Digital Marketing.
The client may even have to change their product strategy to fit in the requirements of the customers as may be suggested by your online market research. The client should be open to such suggestions.
The Digital Marketing scenario in Trivandrum has changed a lot over the past 10 years. The competition has increased a lot. More and more companies have embraced Digital Marketing these days. Clients also have to understand this situation and will have to show some patience to see the desired output.
These facts need to be clearly conveyed to the client before starting the project. It is important to do so for the smooth functioning of the project.
What should be your sales pitch?
We should accept the fact that Clients are always busy. Businesses in Trivandrum always look for objective facts. They don’t really care about your brand image as a Digital Marketing company. Even if you are an independent Digital Marketing consultant, if you have a good track record, you will get the project.
How should you introduce yourself?
The best introduction will be: “I’m a Digital Marketing expert specialized in <client’s respective industry>. I can give you high-quality, highly convertible inbound sales leads at a fraction of the cost you are currently spending on Marketing.” For the Boss, it will sound like music to his ears. But he will definitely ask “How?”.
As you continue the conversation, try not to discuss the technical aspects of Digital Marketing. Avoid talking technical jargons like SEO, SMM etc.
Show the client, the output of your Digital Marketing activities in a previous project. For e.g., if you are talking to a Real Estate client, show him a sample Lead sheet. Explain the fields that you capture and explain the significance of each field. Reiterate the fact that all these sales leads are generated through inbound form submissions.
Next question will be how you generated these leads?
The best way to answer this question will be with the help of one of your best-performing Ads. Explain to the client, how you have strategized the whole advertisement.
Your Ad copy will have sections that are truly aligned with your Ad strategy. Point it out clearly, so that the client will know how much importance you give to the attention-to-detail while writing the Ad copies.
Talk about how you arrived at the advertisement video or graphics design and discuss even the minute details of it and how it helped your previous client projecting his business in front of the audience.
The Call-to-action that you use in the advertisement, especially in Facebook Ads have huge strategic significance. For e.g., if your Ad is for generating buyer leads through Facebook, it is always safer to use a “Get Quote” button. This is based on the psychology that people are always curious to know the price. This will ensure more engagement and link clicks.
Discussing these minute details with the client can help build a nice rapport and your chances of winning the deal increases. The client will also see you as an expert in Digital Marketing. Attaining the thought-leader status is the best possible outcome of your meeting. It will have a positive impact in not just getting the project, but during the project execution phase as well.
In the stage of discussion, you can show him the tools for achieving the kind of results you showed. Then, you should suggest the tools best suited for that particular client and justify your suggestions with facts and figures.
A meeting like this can close a deal in just one sitting. You don’t have to spend your valuable time, effort, and money doing presales activities. All you have to do is proper homework, learn about the client, and be ready with your past work results and portfolio.
If you feel the client is still not going to give you the project, it must be the price.
The ultimate Digital Marketing pricing strategy for Trivandrum
If you want to do business in Trivandrum, be ready to give free trials. The customers are so smart here, they don’t take you for granted.
They will test you to the core and take a final decision based on so many parameters will include the commitment on project deliverables, be it realistic or unrealistic.
In the case of Digital Marketing, you can very well give free trials without losing your profit.
Give a free trial for a period you are comfortable with. Commit on deliverables that matters most to your client. Be sure, the commitment is achievable within the said period.
How to Build a Digital Marketing strategy?
Digital Marketing is ultimately a digital version of whatever marketing activities that you do conventionally. Ideally, for a new client, it should act as an extension of the digital and conventional marketing activities already going on.
As a first step, you need to sit with the client’s marketing and sales team and spend time learning and understanding their existing strategy.
You need to get a better understanding of the buyer persona you are looking at. You can collect details about their existing customers and leads which are going to be converted into an actual business. This data will be a tremendous help for you while selecting the targeting options.
All these activities should be properly documented as a Marketing strategy and should get Sign-off from the client.
A content calendar is to be prepared. It should be aligned with the Digital Marketing strategy. This should also get Sign-off from the client.
How to ensure profitability?
The most important thing to do to ensure the profitability of a Digital marketing project is to cut down non-productive work. The number one non-productive effort is reworking. Reworking the designs eats a lot of the team’s bandwidth and it will go unpaid.
In order to avoid rework, two things have to find their place in your agreement:
- The number of free iterations of the same design has to be limited by a number that you are comfortable with.
- You should insist on assigning a Single Point of Contact on the client-side whom with all your project-related communications shall take place.
These two steps will help you drastically reduce non-productive work.
Your strategy should make it a point that you create the posts well ahead of the schedule and the use of post scheduling functionality, especially in Facebook.
If you have less than 10 clients, do not hire designers and copywriters. Just outsource it.
How to select your outsourcing partner?
Always try to get full-time contractors who have a marketing edge. Share the Post Calendar with them and ensure their availability all through the period of the project.
Use collaborative tools like Asana to manage the work and track progress. Try to have daily team calls. Have the calls without fail even if there is nothing project -specific to be discussed. Join the call, discuss something random for 5 minutes. It keeps up the team spirit and will help all to gel-well.
While sharing the calendar, communicate it clearly to your outsourcing partner about your plans to get the posts ready ahead of the schedule. Push them to fall in line and align with your marketing strategy.
Try to get into an outsourcing agreement with them that they will not charge for multiple iterations and adaptations of the same social media posts designs.
More importantly, the designer you outsource the social media post designs to should be familiar with the dimensions, image guidelines, text overlay limits etc. Your copywriter should be familiar with writing Ad copies, headlines, call-to-action etc. aptly suitable for Digital marketing.
How to create reports that will impress the client?
In this last part of the article, we will see how to make the client happy on the due course of the project. While preparing the reports, it will be nice to have the below parameters included.
- Unique reach
- Impression
- Website traffic (now and before)
- Session duration
- Lead sheet
- Social profile links of the prospects who have submitted leads
- Screenshots of Comments and Message conversations
Give the client a report that will provide him with all the information and make him happy. All the best!
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